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Otto von Bismarck famously said that “Only a fool learns from
his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of
others.” When it comes to digital marketing, there’s much
that we can learn from those who have already been where we’re
trying to go.

Venture Harbour’s Marcus Taylor wrote an in-depth analysis deconstructing how
six blogs, including Mashable, KISSmetrics and ProBlogger,
grew to over one million visitors each in as little time as
six months.

Digital marketing firms Single Grain (where I'm CEO) and
Venture Harbour have collaborated to boil
this analysis down to the seven principles on what set these
successful blogs apart from their less successful competition.

1. Posting frequency matters, but not as much as
persistence. When Pete Cashmore founded
Mashable.com, he worked 20-hour long days writing content for his
site. From Mashable.com’s archives, we can see that in the early
day he consistently wrote one to five articles per day.
ProBlogger’s archives also show a similar frequency of content
publishing.

It’s no secret that the more quality content you publish on your
blog, the faster it will grow. However, there’s something that’s
significantly more important than your blog’s posting frequency
-- persistence.

“The key to success in blogging (and in many areas of life) is
small but regular and consistent actions over a long period of
time,” said Darren Rowse, founder of ProBlogger.

Building a blog is not easy, and requires a huge amount of effort
to reach a tipping point. All of the blogs analyzed persisted
with a high posting frequency over a long period of time.

2. Know the 20 percent that drives 80 percent of your
results. Vilfredo Pareto’s law observes that 80
percent of the effects are typically the result of 20 percent of
the causes. Pareto first observed this pattern in the
distribution of wealth and land ownership in Italy, but soon
noticed that there’s an imbalanced relationship between inputs
and outcomes in many areas of life.

In the context of blogging, 80 percent of your traffic will
usually comes from 20 percent of your content. Eighty percent of
your profits usually comes from 20 percent of your products or
advertisers, and so on.

The blogs that grew the fastest leveraged this phenomenon and
used it to become more effective.

KISSmetrics knew that infographics were its most effective form
of content. As a result, it has posted over 47 of them in two
years, generating over 2.5 million visitors, and 41,000 backlinks
from 3,700 unique domains.

Nick Eubanks built a Japanese blog that took this concept to a
whole new level. He reached 1.4 million visitors in under six
months by cleverly weighting the opportunity and difficulty of
ranking in Google for a list of over 50,000 Japanese key phrases.

With this information, he was able to build a blog that targeted
the 100 keywords that offered the optimum combination of
opportunity and difficulty. It worked.

3. The importance of good timing and owning a
niche. It would be very difficult to build a social
media and technology blog as successful as Mashable starting
today. Cashmore started Mashable just when social media was
emerging. Rowse created ProBlogger just when blogging was
emerging.

Many of the most successful blogs we know of today are successful
in large part thanks to their timing.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s popular book, Outliers, he
speculates that many of the rags to riches stories we hear of
great leaders such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates forget to mention
one important detail -- timing. Of the 75 wealthiest people in
known history, a list that includes ancient pharaohs and kings,
almost 20 percent were born in the same
generation and from the same country.

Timing plays a key role in the equation of success, and it’s
evident when we look at the most successful blogs of today.

While the ships may have sailed for starting high-traffic blogs
on wide topics such as social media, travel or cooking, there is
a limitless and ever increasing myriad of niches that are up for
the taking.

Peep Laja grew ConversionXL to more than 100,000 monthly visitors
in just over a year by choosing a very specific niche
(conversion-rate optimization) and becoming the best blog on that
topic.

4. Over the long run, useful content usually beats viral
content. You might think from reading web-marketing
blogs that viral content is the be all and end all of digital
marketing. Over the long run, though, useful content usually
outperforms viral content.

When analyzing the highest traffic and most-linked to pages on
successful blogs, it became clear that very rarely were the most
successful articles viral hits.

The most linked-to article on ProBlogger is "What is RSS?" On
GetRichSlowly, the most linked-to article is on high-yield
savings accounts. Hardly what springs to mind when you think of
topics for a viral sensation.

5. Building traffic takes time, but this time can be
reduced with planning. Rome wasn’t built in a day,
and neither was Mashable, ProBlogger or KISSmetrics. Building a
high-traffic blog requires time, but this time can be reduced
with careful planning.

As illustrated by Eubank’s example above, careful planning can be
the difference between reaching a million visitors in six months
or 60 months. By knowing specifically how you intend to reach
your goals, you maximize the likelihood of hitting them.

The more specific your plan is, the sooner you can reach your
goals.

6. Utilize the power of compounding. After
analyzing 1,435 good companies, Jim Collins, author of Good
to Great, concluded that one attribute of great companies is
that they all reach what he calls the "Flywheel effect."

The flywheel is a huge heavy metal disc mounted on an axle. It
takes a tremendous amount of energy to turn. The first revolution
may take days of pushing all day and night, but as the flywheel
gains a bit of momentum the second revolution takes a tiny bit
less effort.

After weeks and months of pushing the flywheel it finally reaches
a point where it spins faster and faster under its own weight.
The flywheel is a great analogy of how building a blog works.

What this is really referring to is the power of compounding.
Building a successful blog takes a tremendous amount of effort,
but over time, the amount of effort required to keep it growing,
negotiate deals and drive revenue, decreases.

This effect was perhaps most obvious in Neil Patel’s case with
KISSmetrics. Patel has founded three successful blogs that have
all reached millions of people.

In an article on Quicksprout, Patel says that his first
blog took almost five years to reach 100,000 visitors a month.
His second took just under two years, and his third blog took
just a year and a half to reach 100,000 monthly visitors.

This is a result of the compounding effect of Patel’s
connections, knowledge and opportunities. Put another way, it’s a
lot easier to get to 100,000 monthly visits when you own two
technology companies, an agency and several blogs with hundreds
of thousands of monthly visits.

Just like the first year of starting a savings account, the first
year of blogging is always the hardest, as the power of
compounding is yet to kick in.

7. Using stakes to overcome the emotional
challenges. Growing a blog is an emotional
challenge that requires will, passion and persistence. Successful
bloggers need a driving force that keeps them persisting through
the hard times. We noticed that many of the bloggers analyzed
alluded to having stakes on the line.

Rowse’s wife gave him an ultimatum to make blogging a full-time
job within six months. Cashmore had a strong desire not to be
employed or have to go to university. The others, too, had a
reason to work as hard as they did to get their blogs off the
ground.

In summary. When we learn from the success
of others, we have to take a few things into account. First, the
opposite of what works can also work. The other truth is that
what worked then may not work now.

The point of a principle is to be conceptual enough to work
across multiple scenarios over time. While copying the tactics
that ProBlogger and Mashable used may not be as effective today,
the strategies that got them there do stand the test of time.

By being effective, persistent, patient, and focused, you can
improve your odds of building a successful blog -- as those
before us did.